Dr. Kyger’s Newest E-Find

Alright, here’s this month’s IPAD update. For the most part, I’m going to concentrate on free stuff, or at least ways to save money.

But first I have to mention the biggest IPAD news of the week- The Beatles have finally released their music library to Itunes. The songs cost $1.29 per song, but you don’t have to download an entire album if you don’t want to.

The Beatles – Download The Beatles Music on iTunes

Now to the free stuff. The ABC Player is a great app. If you miss one of their shows, you can use this app as soon as the next day to watch the show for free.

ABC.com – Introducing the ABC Player for iPad

If you like photography you will want to check out The Guardian Eyewitness. The Guardian is an online newspaper based in England. They post one picture a day of something going on in the world. It’s free and some of the pictures look really stunning on the IPAD’s screen.

Now we get to the IBooks App. It is free to download and gives you access to Apple’s online digital book store. In this app, you can look up free books. Anything published prior to 1923 is considered to be in the public domain. You can get most ‘classics’ for free. Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) & James Fenmore Cooper ( The Last of the Mohicans) are just examples of authors you can download for free.

iBooks for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store

Finally, a couple of apps I find really useful. ‘AppShopper’(Free)  & ‘AppAdvice’($1.99) tell you when other apps in the app store go in sale. Companies that make apps will sometimes put their apps on sale for a few days, sometimes at a significant discount. I recently bought a driving game app for 99¢ that originally sold for $9.99 when it was released.

If you have any recommendations, please let me know.

Take Care,
Dr Kyger

Thanksgiving Crafts and Decorations

Thanksgiving Day is a time to offer thanks, family gatherings and holiday meals. A day of turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie, holiday parades with giant balloons and football.

Here are a few ideas for fun Thanksgiving crafts and decorations for you and your family to enjoy.

http://familyfun.go.com/thanksgiving/thanksgiving-craft-decorations/

Dr. Kyger’s Newest E-Find

I know, I know, guys don’t do scrapbooks. I don’t either. But what I’m about to tell you about is pretty cool. There is a company called Blurb. You can find them at Blurb.com and the software they have is called Booksmart. Basically, this company can make a custom book for you. You can do photos, text or combination of both. I have done several photos books of our son that we have used as Christmas gifts. The grandparents love them.

You use the digital photos you have on your computer. The program allows you to open the file that contains the pictures you want to use. You can do all the page layouts yourself or they can make it really simple and have an “autofill” type feature that randomly places all the pictures in the book. You can do a soft cover or a hard cover book. I think their prices are pretty reasonable. An example- the last one I did was a 10×8 inch hard cover, had 80 pages and about 250 pictures in it. The cost was $39.95. I’m pretty sure I would have spent many times that in ink cartridges for my computer printer. Apple has a similar service associated with their iphoto program, but their books cost about 3 times as much.

There is no cost to download the software, you send all the photos electronically, and you get the books back in about 10 days. Have fun!!

Dr Kyger’s Newest E-Find

Here’s this month’s IPAD update. I really like this application I just found called Informant HD. It is a calendar application that also includes a ‘to do’ list. For appointments, it interacts with your contact list and Google Maps, so it can pull up a map of where you need to go. Pretty handy.

There is a free app called Fotopedia Heritage that has over 20,000 photos taken at World Heritage Sites. It has an interactive map and you can pull up descriptions of the pictures you are looking at. It is a neat way to ‘travel the world’.
‘My Library’ is an app that organizes your book, DVD, and CD collections. One really handy feature is you can check off items you have loaned out (you can specify who has them), so hopefully you will get them back someday. The DVD section organizes the movies by genre and you can pull up a movie synopsis of a particular movie.

As far as games go– I really like Meteor Blitz- it is basically a jazzed up version of asteroids. Another fun one my son likes is Spider HD. You are a spider roaming around an old house. You have to jump around, spin webs and catch all the flying bugs in the room to move on. Gruesome, but fun.

If anyone has any recommendations, please let me know.

Until next month,

Dr Kyger

Dr Kyger’s Newest E-Find

Yes, I admit that I was one of those people waiting in line the morning the iPad was released.  The word I would use to describe it is, ‘awesome’.  Love it.

I chose to get the WiFi version.  I didn’t really feel the need to get 3G version.  They are significantly more expensive and you have a monthly service fee you have to pay to AT&T.

For the most part, I view it as an entertainment device, but it does have some practical uses.  I really like the fact that I can check my e-mail while sitting in the living room watching TV.  USA Today, and AP news have very good news applications that I use quite a lot.  Apple has an app called ‘Pages’ which allows you to write text documents (which can include pictures) that can be converted to word documents on your computer.  I’m planning on using this app for our holiday newsletter this year.  One of my favorite ‘practical’ applications is something called Instapaper.  What Instapaper does is it allows you to download an article you are reading on the web onto your iPad to be read later.  This really comes in handy for plane travel.  What I do is a few days before going on a trip, I’ll spend some time surfing the web and download a bunch of articles I’m interested in.  That way, I’ll have plenty of reading material when I’ve exhausted the in flight magazine.

For the kids, there are a ton of great educational apps.  You can download interactive Dr. Seuss books (we have The Lorax and Dr. Seuss’ ABC book).  The PBS show ‘Super Why’ has a great interactive learning to read app.  One of our son’s favorites is an interactive Jack and the Beanstalk book.

For the kid in all of us, Marvel and DC comics have apps where you can download comics.  In general, the comics aren’t free (they cost $1.99 each), but every week, both apps offer 3 to 5 free comics.  If you have younger kids, you might want to review them first.  Both companies do have ‘all ages’ comics that are fine for the younger kids.

Well, that’s it for this month.  I’ll keep you posted on any more goodies I discover.

Dr. Kyger